Race, ethnicity and belonging

The status of ‘slave’ has been inescapably linked to questions of race and racism since at least the late fifteenth century. The transatlantic slave trade set in motion a process through which slave, and the stigma attaching therein, were bound to Africa and Africans in European imaginations. European pretensions to moral ‘superiority’ were in turn codified and justified through a pseudoscience of race that emerged and flourished from the eighteenth century onwards. This ‘scientific racism’ asserted the existence of distinct and hierarchically ordered ‘types’ of human being, then racialised people from Africa as ‘black’ and encoded blackness with the dirt, dishonour, and dependency attributed to slaves. The history of transatlantic slavery is thus powerfully entwined with: 1) the emergence of the idea that race creates impermeable borders between flesh and blood human beings in terms of their capacities, moral worth and rights; and 2) a very specific form of antiblack racism. Read on...

The British government has admitted to having no plans to recognise the UN International Decade for People of African Descent. At a time when racialised discrimination and inequality are rampant, this is unacceptable.

Discussions of migration are becoming increasingly dystopian. Based upon either exclusion or exploitation, new neoliberal arguments for open borders are not about freedom, but institutionalised domination.

France is the only European slave-trading nation to legally recognise slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity, but questions of racial discrimination and colonial exploitation remain unresolved.

Brazil’s government has taken important steps to combat racial inequalities over the past two decades. Afro-Brazilian populations nevertheless remain socially and economically excluded, continuing patterns that began with legal slavery.

Beyond Trafficking and Slavery seeks to help those trying to understand forced labour, trafficking and slavery by combining the rigour of academic scholarship with the clarity of journalism. Our goal is to use evidence-based advocacy to unveil the structural political, economic, and social root causes of global exploitation.

Gendered, racist, classist, homophobic, and transphobic violence haunts the world of sex work. Sex workers speak. Who listens? addresses that violence, but it does so from the perspective of sex workers themselves. By publishing their voices directly we hope to help readers resist indifference and to become more critical of states’ interventions.

The BTS Short Course brings 167 contributions from 150 top academics and practitioners into the world’s first open access ‘e-syllabus’ on forced labour, trafficking, and slavery. This eight-volume set is packed with insights from the some of the best and most progressive scholarship available. Read on...